A Matter of Scales: Cybernature, Sexuality, and Capitalism in Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge

Abstract

This article analyzes Eduardo Williams' film "The Human Surge" (2016) as a speculative audiovisual fiction, drawing from concepts that address the crisis of the modern episteme on what's human. Williams' first feature film connects three spaces—Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines—through technology and nature. It doesn't have a central storyline or a dramatic conflict; instead, the camera follows the characters as they walk through various locations, almost in a documentary style. Simultaneously, both the spatiality and temporality are disrupted, creating a time-space that is neither dystopian nor utopian, neither technological speculation nor pre-history. Instead, it places itself in the intermediaries, on the margins, finding possibilities for resistance to the constant flows of global capitalism. Therefore, the film can be considered 'weird' in Fisher's (2018) terms, as passageways, corridors, labyrinths, burrows, and holes play a fundamental role in constructing speculative spaces that resemble our present in this developing world more than the mainstream imaginaries of science fiction. In this sense, Williams' feature film envisions, cinematically, a future in which the experience of what's weird is established to break with the centrality of what's human and, consequently, the bourgeois nuclear family and the binary between heterosexuality and homosexuality